Mass Effect 2 - conversations

I posted my impressions of ME2 a while back. Looking back at that post, I realised that there was one significant omission from it.

First off - I should say that I loved ME2. I think its a great game and, in many ways, it really is a lot better than ME1. The combat gameplay is so much better, it feels like a different game. ME2 also has one of my favourite NPCs of all time (namely, the very model of a scientist Salarian, Mordin Solus) who has some of the best dialogue in the game. However, despite the fact that BioWare really made a lot of improvements in the design of ME2, there was something about it which felt off. There was something which prevented me from playing it as much as I played the original ME1.

And reading this article put that reason into focus for me. Ultimately, I felt that the decisions in ME1 were better than in ME2.

If you look back at my post on ME1, you will find that I actually devoted a fairly large chunk of the post to the role playing decisions that you got to make in that game. In particular, one of the things I loved about ME1 was that making renegade decisions often felt like taking a very pragmatic approach to the problem versus an idealised goody-goody two shoes approach. This really allowed me to play my FemShep as a good person out to save the Universe but who didn't have time to deal with the niceties of a social situation. She wasn't nasty - she was just purely focused on the mission. As I put it in my original post - if you got in her way, she would take you down without a second thought.

However, the decisions in ME2 didn't give me that same impression. In playing ME2, I very often felt like the responses were boiling down into a nice Shep vs jerk Shep situation (granted, there were some exceptions but this was the overall feeling I got). The problem is that my FemShep wasn't a jerk and the renegade response often felt like it was being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk. And this is borne out by my bitch brigade FemShep in ME2, who halfway through the game, had a high paragon meter but only a small renegade meter which was the opposite of what she had at the end of ME1. In the end, I had to start acting like a jerk just so I could up my renegade meter (as you know, having a high renegade meter is important if you want to make certain renegade decisions).

For whatever reason, BioWare weren't able to avoid the nice Shep / jerk Shep situations which they avoided so well in ME1. Hopefully, things will improve with ME3.